Ungrammatical Sentences Research Articles

DHH and L2 college students' knowledge of English resultatives and depictives.

College-level deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students and hearing students of English as a Second Language (L2) along with hearing native speakers (NS) of English were assessed in their knowledge of English resultative and depictive sentences. In "Kevin wiped the table clean," the resultative phrase "clean" indicates that the table became clean as a result of Kevin wiping it. In "Megan drove the car drunk," the depictive phrase "drunk" describes Megan's state throughout the entire event of driving. Findings of a sentence-acceptability rating scale task revealed higher performance by the NS group compared to the DHH and L2 groups, whose near-equivalent performance improved with increasing overall English proficiency. Participants exhibited higher performance on active, passive, and unaccusative resultative sentences than on ungrammatical unergative resultatives and higher performance on grammatical than ungrammatical depictive sentence types. These findings contribute new insights into the comparative study of English acquisition by DHH and L2 learners.

A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Phrase Structure and Subject Island Violations.

In principle, functional neuroimaging provides uniquely informative data in addressing linguistic questions, because it can indicate distinct processes that are not apparent from behavioral data alone. This could involve adjudicating the source of unacceptability via the different patterns of elicited brain responses to different ungrammatical sentence types. However, it is difficult to interpret brain activations to syntactic violations. Such responses could reflect processes that have nothing intrinsically related to linguistic representations, such as domain-general executive function abilities. To facilitate the potential use of functional neuroimaging methods to identify the source of different syntactic violations, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment to identify the brain activation maps associated with two distinct syntactic violation types: phrase structure (created by inverting the order of two adjacent words within a sentence) and subject islands (created by extracting a wh-phrase out of an embedded subject). The comparison of these violations to control sentences surprisingly showed no indication of a generalized violation response, with almost completely divergent activation patterns. Phrase structure violations seemingly activated regions previously implicated in verbal working memory and structural complexity in sentence processing, whereas the subject islands appeared to activate regions previously implicated in conceptual-semantic processing, broadly defined. We review our findings in the context of previous research on syntactic and semantic violations using ERPs. Although our results suggest potentially distinct underlying mechanisms underlying phrase structure and subject island violations, our results are tentative and suggest important methodological considerations for future research in this area.

An fMRI study of phrase structure and subject island violations.

In principle, functional neuroimaging provides uniquely informative data in addressing linguistic questions, because it can indicate distinct processes that are not apparent from behavioral data alone. This could involve adjudicating the source of unacceptability via the different patterns of elicited brain responses to different ungrammatical sentence types. However, it is difficult to interpret brain activations to syntactic violations. Such responses could reflect processes that have nothing intrinsically related to linguistic representations, such as domain-general executive function abilities. In order to facilitate the potential use of functional neuroimaging methods to identify the source of different syntactic violations, we conducted an fMRI experiment to identify the brain activation maps associated with two distinct syntactic violation types: phrase structure (created by inverting the order of two adjacent words within a sentence) and subject islands (created by extracting a wh-phrase out of an embedded subject). The comparison of these violations to control sentences surprisingly showed no indication of a generalized violation response, with almost completely divergent activation patterns. Phrase structure violations seemingly activated regions previously implicated in verbal working memory and structural complexity in sentence processing, whereas the subject islands appeared to activate regions previously implicated in conceptual-semantic processing, broadly defined. We review our findings in the context of previous research on syntactic and semantic violations using event-related potentials. Although our results suggest potentially distinct underlying mechanisms underlying phrase structure and subject island violations, our results are tentative and suggest important methodological considerations for future research in this area.

Grammaticality judgements of tense by young adult speakers of Shona

This study examined grammaticality judgements of tense by 40 young adult native speakers of Shona during an online task. This study reports response accuracy and reaction times on the reading of time reference violations in which verb forms do not match a time frame previously set by an adverb. The judgements were elicited using 240 sentences with and without grammatical violations during an online reading task. Overall, in the experimental task, the native speakers performed below 78% across the four conditions, despite the sentences having received acceptability ratings of 1 = acceptable, 2 = unacceptable for grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, respectively. Sentences with the violation of the recent past by remote past tense verb had the lowest response accuracy scores. The participants also took the longest time to detect the errors in this same condition, meaning sentences with the recent past adverb context had the lowest response accuracy, with the sentence with the recent past context and remote past tense verb violation the most difficult to detect. The participants were quicker in detecting errors in the sentences with the remote adverb context and recent past tense verb. The findings demonstrate the utility of grammaticality judgement tasks for revealing language processing difficulties.

Flexible word position coding in reading: Roles for attention and memory.

Readers may fail to notice the error in 'Do love you me?': this is the recently established transposed-word (TW) phenomenon. Word position coding is a novel cognitive construct, and researchers are presently debating the underlying mechanisms. Here I investigated roles for attention and memory. Participants (N = 54) made grammaticality judgements to four-word sequences that formed correct sentences ('The man can run', 'The dog was here'), TW sentences ('The can man run', 'The was dog here'), or ungrammatical control sentences ('The man dog run', 'The was can here'). Sequences were replaced by post-masks after 200ms, and that post-mask was accompanied by a 50-ms retro-cue in the form of an 'X' presented at a critical location (where one could have locally inferred grammaticality; e.g., between the first and second word of 'The was dog here') or a non-critical location (e.g., between the third and fourth word of 'The was dog here'). TW sentences were harder to reject than control sentences - the classic TW effect - and crucially, this effect was modulated by cue validity, with valid cues attenuating TW effects compared to invalid cues. The present results suggest that focused attention aids the process of binding words to locations. Furthermore, as cues appeared after sentence offset, these results suggest that word position coding may take place in memory.

L2 cognitive construal and morphosyntactic acquisition of pseudo-passive constructions

Abstract Discussion of the theoretical underpinning of pseudo-passive constructions abounds in generative linguistics and comparative typology. However, the cognitive construal of and morphosyntactic acquisition of (un)grammatical English pseudo-passive constructions by Chinese-speaking L2-English users with different proficiency levels have never been investigated. It is worth examining whether proficiency level modulates constructional acceptability and cognitive construal, which would allow us to infer L2-English users’ morphosyntactic acquisition stages of pseudo-passive constructions. To fill this research gap, the study recruited 120 L2-English speakers with different levels of proficiency and 40 native English speakers to complete a grammaticality judgment test with an acceptance judgment scale from −2 to 2 for 40 ungrammatical pseudo-passive sentences and 40 fillers. Proficiency level significantly correlates with a firmer rejection of ungrammatical pseudo-passive sentences and cognitive construal which is more target-like. Significantly asymmetrical acceptance levels between two types of target ungrammatical constructions are also revealed for low (p = 0.002) and medium proficiency (p = 0.000) groups, demonstrating the type effect on grammaticality judgment and morphosyntactic acquisition.

Neural Networks as Cognitive Models of the Processing of Syntactic Constraints.

Languages are governed by syntactic constraints-structural rules that determine which sentences are grammatical in the language. In English, one such constraint is subject-verb agreement, which dictates that the number of a verb must match the number of its corresponding subject: "the dogs run", but "the dog runs". While this constraint appears to be simple, in practice speakers make agreement errors, particularly when a noun phrase near the verb differs in number from the subject (for example, a speaker might produce the ungrammatical sentence "the key to the cabinets are rusty"). This phenomenon, referred to as agreement attraction, is sensitive to a wide range of properties of the sentence; no single existing model is able to generate predictions for the wide variety of materials studied in the human experimental literature. We explore the viability of neural network language models-broad-coverage systems trained to predict the next word in a corpus-as a framework for addressing this limitation. We analyze the agreement errors made by Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and compare them to those of humans. The models successfully simulate certain results, such as the so-called number asymmetry and the difference between attraction strength in grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, but failed to simulate others, such as the effect of syntactic distance or notional (conceptual) number. We further evaluate networks trained with explicit syntactic supervision, and find that this form of supervision does not always lead to more human-like syntactic behavior. Finally, we show that the corpus used to train a network significantly affects the pattern of agreement errors produced by the network, and discuss the strengths and limitations of neural networks as a tool for understanding human syntactic processing.

Complexity, frequency, and acceptability

It is sometimes argued that (certain types of) lexical frequency and constructional frequency determine how easy sentences are to process and hence, how acceptable speakers find them. Others have argued that grammatical principles interact with and often override such effects. Here, we present the results from a survey on Danish with more than 200 participants. We asked people to provide acceptability ratings of a number of sentences with varying levels of complexity, with and without extraction, including complement clauses, relative clauses, parasitic gaps, and ungrammatical sentences. We predicted structural complexity and acceptability to be negatively correlated (the more complex, the less acceptable). The results show that construction frequency and acceptability are correlated, but that zero and near-zero frequencies do not predict acceptability. However, there is indeed an even stronger inverse correlation between acceptability and structural complexity, defined as a function of independently motivated factors of syntactic structure and processing, including embedding, adjunction, extraction, and distance between filler and gap. Lexical frequency also affects acceptability, but the effects are small, and, crucially, there is no evidence in our data that ungrammatical sentences are affected by such frequency effects. Furthermore, the acceptability patterns seem to be fairly stable across participants. The results show a pattern that is consistent with an approach based on grammatical principles and processing constraints, rather than based on stochastic principles alone.

Online reflexive resolution and interference

ABSTRACT A reflexive referentially depends on another NP. Long-standing inquiries in sentence processing literature revolve around whether and how forming this coreference relation during online sentence processing is susceptible to similarity-based interference. To address these questions, we conducted four experiments using L-maze tasks. The results revealed (delayed) interference in ungrammatical sentences, indicating facilitatory interference. We also found that structural information associated with a distractor and related to clause finiteness may influence memory retrieval. Interference effects were not observed in grammatical sentences across all experiments. These results suggest that online reflexive resolution may be susceptible to interference only when the reflexive mismatches its structurally accessible antecedent in features, and that structural information may influence how a distractor interferes with memory retrieval during online sentence processing.

Neural correlates of processing active and passive sentences: proficiency-dependent event-related potential evidence in Chinese English foreign language learners.

We explored whether and to what extent the neural mechanisms of second language sentence processing resemble those of native speakers by investigating the temporal dynamics of syntactic processing in terms of active or passive voice in reading English sentences by Chinese English Foreign Language (EFL) learners with high or low English proficiency. Participants were divided into two groups based on their proficiency levels in English. Three types of sentences (active, passive and ungrammatical) were presented to participants when their event-related potential responses were recorded at the verbs and the final words. The results showed that high-proficiency participants exhibited a greater anterior negativity at the verb position for ungrammatical sentences compared to active sentences. Furthermore, passive sentences elicited a larger frontal positivity than active sentences at the final word position. Additionally, greater P600 effects were observed for both passive and ungrammatical sentences than active sentences at the final word. The low-proficiency group exhibited a greater anterior negativity at the verb (but not the final word) position. In conclusion, these findings emphasize the role of proficiency as a modulating factor in the processing of English active and passive sentences among Chinese EFL learners. Furthermore, the processing of English active and passive sentences by these learners can be conceptualized as a three-stage process: prediction, correction and integration, representing the underlying cognitive mechanisms. This study provides novel insights into the understanding of the cognitive mechanism involved in second language sentence processing.

The effect of asymmetric grammatical gender systems on second language processing: Evidence from ERPs

Aims and objectives: This study examined the effect of the first language (L1) grammatical gender (GG) system on the second language (L2) gender agreement processing, particularly when L1 and L2 are asymmetric in their number of gender values such as in Spanish and German languages. Methodology: Behavioral and brain responses (ERPs) were registered while German native-speakers (16) and Spanish-German bilinguals (24) read sentences for comprehension. We manipulated gender agreement between the determiner and the noun: Der/*die Ring, “themasc/*thefem ringmasc.” The nouns were either of similar or opposite gender across languages or unique in L2 (neuter gender). Data and analysis: Behavioral responses measured participants’ ability to discriminate grammatical from ungrammatical sentences. For ERPs, N400 and P600 components were analyzed by means of a linear mixed-effect model. Findings/conclusion: Behavioral data showed that German native-speakers discriminated gender agreement violations better than Spanish-German bilinguals, irrespective of lexical gender overlap across languages. Native speakers showed a P600 effect to gender agreement violations, whereas bilinguals showed an N400-like effect to gender mismatches that involved same-gender nouns across languages and neuter gender nouns. Interestingly, opposite gender nouns between L1 and L2 that agreed in gender with the determiner were processed as incorrect for the bilinguals. These results suggest transfer effects from L2 learners’ L1 GG system that facilitate L2 gender agreement processing for similar and neuter gender nouns or hinder it for opposite gender nouns across languages. Originality: This study used ERPs to demonstrate how asymmetries in terms of the number of lexical gender categories between L1 and L2 GG systems can affect L2 learners’ ability to process L2 gender agreement in a native-like manner. Significance/implications: These findings elucidate the challenges L2 learners face when learning a three-gender value system in L2, including a great number of gender incongruences between L1 and L2 nouns and a new neuter gender category.

Working memory and proficiency:

This study aimed to delve into the role of working memory and proficiency concerning functional morphology in second language processing. We performed two tasks, an acceptability judgment with memory load and a 2-back, with higher and lower proficiency Brazilian Portuguese-English learners. We measured their proficiency level and investigated their performance in working memory capacity and inflectional morphology processing. The morphemes under investigation were the third-person singular (-s) and the regular past tense (-ed) in grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Our results indicate that neither working memory nor proficiency influenced their performance. These findings seem related to the allocation of attentional resources since they could not focus on the missing morphemes in the acceptability judgment task.

Grammaticality and Acceptability in the Urhobo Language

This paper examines grammaticality and acceptability in the Ulrhobo language. Grammaticality has to do with well formedness of syntactic structures; grammaticality is usually considered as the structure of sentences and the order in which they are combined together to form sentences. A sentence can conform to the syntactic rule if it is constructed in a grammatical form. The study adopts the truth conditioning theory of meaning as a theoretical framework. The truth conditioning theory of meaning deals with the grammaticality and acceptability of sentence structures. The study reviews that the basic grammar of the Urhobo language conforms to the standard paradigm of a language structure such as Qualifier + Noun + verb + modifier + Adjective, etc and that when these sentences are not properly ordered according to the grammatical rules of the Urhobo language, they are systematically deformed (by inversion, suppression or addition of non-terminal elements in its production rules) to produce a series of grammars generating grammatical, semantically acceptable, semi-grammatical or ungrammatical sentences. It also reviewed that the sentence structures of the Urhobo language conform with the constraints of a sentence structure rule and are, therefore, rule, accepted, while others that don’t are, therefore, rule unaccepted. The study further reveals that a sentence must have a string of words that conform to the rule of syntax, such as subject and predicate, which form the basis of grammaticality or acceptability of the sentence. Finally, the study reveals that grammaticality and acceptability can occur in both written and spoken language. It is also a finding that acceptability is more basic rather than grammaticality since all hearers of the Urhobo language can understand or interpret what the speakers convey in a given structure of the language.

Expectations modulate retrieval interference during ellipsis resolution

Memory operations during language comprehension are subject to interference: retrieval is harder when items are linguistically similar to each other. We test how such interference effects might be modulated by linguistic expectations. Theories differ in how these factors might interact; we consider three possibilities: (i) predictability determines the need for retrieval, (ii) predictability affects cue-preference during retrieval, or (iii) word predictability moderates the effect of noise in memory during retrieval. We first demonstrate that expectations for a target word modulate retrieval interference in Mandarin noun-phrase ellipsis in an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment. This result obtains in globally ungrammatical sentences – termed “facilitatory interference.” Such a pattern is inconsistent with theories that focus only on the need for retrieval. To tease apart cue-preferences from noisy-memory representations, we operationalize the latter using a Transformer neural network language model. Confronting the model with our stimuli reveals an interference effect, consistent with prior work, but that effect does not interact with predictability in contrast to human EEG results. Together, these data are most consistent with the hypothesis that the predictability of target items affects cue-preferences during retrieval.

Effect of Healthy Aging and Gender on Syntactic Input Processing: A P600 Event-Related Potential Study.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of healthy aging and gender, as well as the interaction, thereof, on syntactic input processing during sentence comprehension. This was achieved through the recording of the P600 event-related potential. Sixty Flemish (native speakers of Dutch) participants (30 men and 30 women), equally distributed into three age groups (young, middle-aged, and older adults), were subjected to a visually presented word order violation task under simultaneous electro-encephalography recording. The task contained 60 sentences, of which half were grammatical and half contained a word order violation. P600 responses were analyzed for amplitude, latency, topographical distribution, and source localization. Regarding the effect of healthy aging, no age-related differences were found for the amplitude, onset latency, and topographical distribution of the P600 effect (difference wave). Although aging effects on the P600 effect amplitude were absent, a reduced P600 amplitude in response to both the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences was found, next to a reduced overall degree of source activation in linguistic regions of interest. Also, a reduced behavioral accuracy in response to the word order violation was observed in the older adults group. Regarding the effect of gender, females exhibited a larger P600 effect amplitude and a reduced behavioral accuracy compared to males. No gender-related differences were found for P600 effect onset latency, topographical distribution, and source activation. While this study demonstrates no effect of aging on the P600 effect, the lower behavioral response and absence of any activation shift argues against functional compensation. Moreover, although increased neural activation in women combined with their reduced behavioral accuracy may indicate the use of different cognitive strategies in men and women, source localization analysis could not objectify this hypothesis.

Illusions of plausibility in adjuncts and co-ordination

ABSTRACT Illusions of grammaticality, where ungrammatical sentences are misperceived as grammatical (e.g. The key to the cabinets were rusty), have been widely studied during language comprehension. Such grammatical illusions have been influential in debate surrounding so-called representational and retrieval-based accounts of linguistic dependency resolution. Whether analogous illusions of plausibility occur at the level of semantic interpretation has only recently begun to be examined, and thus far, these illusions have been restricted to a narrow range of linguistic phenomena. In two eye-tracking during reading experiments (n = 48 in each) and two self-paced reading experiments (n = 192 in each) we examined the possibility of semantic illusions during the processing of adjuncts and co-ordination. Across experiments, our results suggest illusions of plausibility during dependency resolution, though interference effects were clearer in adjuncts than co-ordination. We argue that our findings are more compatible with retrieval-based rather than representational accounts of linguistic dependency resolution.

The transposed word effect is consistent with serial word recognition and varies with reading speed

The scientific study of reading has long been animated by questions of parallel vs. serial processing. Do readers recognize words serially, adding each one sequentially to a representation of the sentence structure? One fascinating phenomenon to emerge from this research is the transposed word effect: when asked to judge whether sentences are grammatical, readers often fail to notice grammatical errors caused by transposing two words. This effect could be evidence that readers recognize multiple words in parallel. Here we provide converging evidence that the transposed word effect is also consistent with serial processing because it occurs robustly when the words in each sentence are presented serially. We further investigated how the effect relates to individual differences in reading speed, to gaze fixation patterns, and to differences in difficulty across sentences. In a pretest, we first measured the natural English reading rate of 37 participants, which varied widely. In a subsequent grammatical decision task, we presented grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in two modes: one with all words presented simultaneously, and the other with single words presented sequentially at each participant’s natural rate. Unlike prior studies that used a fixed sequential presentation rate, we found that the magnitude of the transposed word effect was at least as strong in the sequential presentation mode as in the simultaneous mode, for both error rates and response times. Moreover, faster readers were more likely to miss transpositions of words presented sequentially. We argue that these data favor a “noisy channel” model of comprehension in which skilled readers rely on prior knowledge to rapidly infer the meaning of sentences, allowing for apparent errors in spatial or temporal order, even when the individual words are recognized one at a time.

Morphological transparency and markedness matter in heritage speaker gender processing: an EEG study.

The present study investigated the qualitative nature of grammatical gender knowledge and processing in heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish living in the United States. Forty-four adult Spanish HS bilinguals participated, completing a behavioral grammatical gender assignment task and a grammaticality judgment task (GJT) while their brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). The EEG GJT task included grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with grammatical gender violations on inanimate nouns, where transparency of the morpho(phono)logical cue and markedness were manipulated. The results of this study revealed that grammatical gender violations elicited the typical P600 effect across all relevant conditions, indicating that the grammatical representations and processing of grammatical gender in HSs are qualitatively similar to those in Spanish-dominant native speakers. Given the experimental manipulation in this study, these findings also suggest that both morphological transparency and markedness play significant roles in how grammatical gender is processed. However, the results of this study differ from those reported in previous studies with Spanish-dominant native speakers, as the P600 effect found was accompanied by a biphasic N400 effect. This pattern of results is interpreted as further evidence that the bilingual experience of HSs modulates certain aspects of morphosyntactic processing, particularly conferring a greater reliance on morphology. Additionally, the results of this study highlight the importance of incorporating neurolinguistic online processing methods to better understand what underlies HS bilingual competence and processing outcomes.

The transposed-word effect provides no unequivocal evidence for parallel processing

Studies using a grammaticality decision task have revealed surprising flexibility in the processing of word order during sentence reading in both alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts. Participants in these studies typically exhibit a transposed-word effect, in which they make more errors and slower correct responses for stimuli that contain a word transposition and are derived from grammatical as compared to ungrammatical base sentences. Some researchers have used this finding to argue that words are encoded in parallel during reading, such that multiple words can be processed simultaneously and might be recognised out of order. This contrasts with an alternative account of the reading process, which argues that words must be encoded serially, one at a time. We examined, in English, whether the transposed-word effect provides evidence for a parallel-processing account, employing the same grammaticality decision task used in previous research and display procedures that either allowed for parallel word encoding or permitted only the serial encoding of words. Our results replicate and extend recent findings by showing that relative word order can be processed flexibly even when parallel processing is not possible (i.e., within displays requiring serial word encoding). Accordingly, while the present findings provide further evidence for flexibility in the processing of relative word order during reading, they add to converging evidence that the transposed-word effect does not provide unequivocal evidence for a parallel-processing account of reading. We consider how the present findings may be accounted for by both serial and parallel accounts of word recognition in reading.

The role of automatised and non-automatised explicit knowledge in general L2 proficiency

ABSTRACT This study examines the knowledge representation of Japanese university students assessed using grammaticality judgement tests (GJTs) and a metalinguistic knowledge test (MKT). The study also investigates the role of automatised and non-automatised explicit knowledge in general L2 language proficiency. Participants were 87 late learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) who completed the timed and untimed GJTs and MKT, modified Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT), and the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). The principal component factor analysis results indicated that ungrammatical sentences in the GJTs loaded on non-automatised explicit knowledge, whereas grammatical sentences loaded on automatised explicit knowledge. The score for ungrammatical sections on the timed GJT was the most significant predictor of all components of the TOEIC. The results also indicated that the time pressure applied in the timed GJT could not sufficiently limit participants’ access to explicit knowledge when they processed grammatical sentences. The findings suggest that non-automatised explicit knowledge may play a more significant role than automatised explicit knowledge in L2 proficiency in the case of Japanese EFL learners.